Tidal Pool – An Ars Poetica

The beaches I love are messy, but not with litter, because crowds never seek these shores. These beaches are rugged, with jagged cliffs cut by cold water under brooding skies. Here the cliffs catch hidden worlds by stranding crystal tidal waters in crevices creating microcosms. I climb over rocks slippery with algae, earthy brown and sea green. Through rain and salty spray, I peer into the pools until I find a trapped world. I crouch on the edge and stare like a voyeur while my feet go numb as a transient tide soaks my sneakers.

If I stand very still at this world’s edge, slowly a story unfolds. Anemones stretch frosty pink tentacles into the liquid atmosphere, orange sea stars move imperceptibly in predatory silence, tiny shrimp flash across my field of view, and young fish emerge from soft seaweed lairs. The feathery feet of muscles and barnacles wave in the current like fragile gardens in a fluid breeze. On the walls of this world, hundreds of shells- periwinkles and limpets- shine in crisp shades of blue, orange, and bright white. The pool pulses with color, like a Van Gogh sprung to life.

I wait quietly and patiently until I can hear my heart beat in time with the pounding of surf on stone and my mind becomes as calm as the pool’s surreal surface. Then, reaching underwater, I break the tenuous boundary, trying to touch the world beneath. Like lightning, the world is fleeting. Most of it escapes, but I grab one shell, a blue periwinkle. Like a thread, the bright shell tethers me to the vibrant tides for a moment, although I know that in the alien air it will soon dry to a dull gray.

Suddenly, a rushing surge bathes the pool in clean, cool ocean, reclaiming the liminal world before I can fully grasp it. Startled as if from sleepwalking, I shrink away from the sea’s icy reach, but the renewal of the surface and the dredging of the depths release another epoch, luring me again to the edge.

When I read, I often do so in the same way that I search a shoreline. Finding words like flotsam cast up from an impenetrable abyss. The fragments of secret worlds lie stranded on my shores, creating microcosms in my mind. My thoughts wash over them like tidal waters spawning worlds eternally new. Then I begin to write, and when I do, I like my mind to be a shore seeded with everything that the ocean can cast out- rockweed, jelly, shell, and stone- a bit of everything animal, vegetable, and mineral, with urchins in between. I pull patterns from primal beauty as I choose a stone here- not too large, not too blue, and a shell there- just enough pink to answer the quartz’ translucent hue. I could play all day among the words collecting the proper pieces until in my bag the fragments begin to respond to each other beneath the hiss of the surf, speaking shadow to shine, sharp to smooth, spiral to sphere, soft to severe.